Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Why is Washington Worried As Georgia's Turns To Russia?

If you are going to piss off the biggest kid in the neighbourhood, heres how to do it. NATO training camp in Georgia, right on Russia's doorstep (Source: Getty images)

Analysis of results from opinion polls taken conducted throughout 2015 in the small Caucasian nation of Georgia show a trend of reducing support for government’s aims of joining the European Union and NATO.

“That coincides with increasing support for anti-West and pro-Russia political groups in Georgia's elections,” a report suggests.

“The United States and Europe have poured billions into promoting democracy and economic development there [Georgia], and Tbilisi has consistently responded with an enthusiastic embrace of Westernization,” an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Michael Hikari Cecire writes for the Monkey Cage blog section of The Washington Post.

The author of the polling report puts this change of mood down to what he calls “expansion fatigue in the United States and the Europe Union breeding fatalism in Georgia, and incubating a political environment where pro-Russia factions’ anti-west crusades are gaining traction”.

We would suggest the answer is more simple, Georgians see what intractible messes have been caused by American and European intervention in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Ukraine and the economic chaos and social disorder inflicted on the people of Greece by their government's ill advised entanglement with the bureaucrats of Brussels and the European Single Currency system and they are thinking, "Not for us thanks."

As ever, faced with a setback to their plans for global domination, the American reaction to Georgia's turn towards Moscow has been bellicose and offer the prospect of another unwinnable conflict fought by US proxies similar to ISIS and the right - wing government in Kiev but funded by western taxpayers.

NATO, the US dominated North Atlantic Treaty Alliance established to counter largely imagined "Soviet threat to world peace" has been seeking Russia's destruction since 1949; surprisingly, the Alliance continues to encircle the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union and dissolution of the Warsaw Pact military alliance of Europe's communist bloc.

Recent geopolitical developments indicate NATO is hoping to undermine the Russian economy which is heavily dependent on oil and gas exports to Europe. This has been the suspected motive behind the costly and so far unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria. So long as Assad is in power Syria remains an obstacle to plans for a pipeline direct from the Persian Gulf oil producers to the Mediterranean coast. Such a pipeline would enable Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates along with the Wall Street bankers that control the oil trade to exercise a stranglehold on Russia's oil trade.

Gary Leupp, a Professor of History at Tufts University, USA, questions whether it is actually NATO which presents thw greater threat to security. Leupp reminds us we know that Vladimir Putin will not let Assad fall, and if the west attacks Syria, Russia and China will intervene in support of their ally

“If Georgia turned away from the West, it would not only be a blow to the country’s nascent democracy, but it would also sew up the Eurasian interior for Moscow, give Russia a direct corridor to the Middle East, lop off Western access to Eurasian energy sources.” he states.

Returning to the analysis of polling data, statistics show steady growth in reported pro-EEU sentiment to 2014 from 11 percent in August 2013 to 31 percent in April 2015, and then as Ukraine descended into chaos and the conflict in Syria escalated, a sharp fall is seen.